Before he was introduced to an application that makes it easy for farmers to receive soft loans without ambiguous collateral, Bunmi Akerele, a mid-fifties farmer, faced difficulty upscaling his farm.
He could not afford farm inputs like fertilisers, tractors, quality seeds and pesticides, hence his crops suffered from low yields and farming became tedious labour without gains.
Akerele, like several other farmers in Nigeria, did not know where to acquire loans that did not require collateral beyond his financial capacity, but with Crop2Cash, a platform that makes it easy for rural farmers to access soft loans and bookkeep their profits with just a USSD code, he has now up-scaled his farm.
“Through platforms like Crop2Cash, I have been able to get farm inputs at a reasonable price range,” Akerele said in an interview.
Agritech companies are becoming more important than ever; with technology, they are rewriting the story of agriculture in Nigeria.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), over 80 percent of farmers in Africa’s most populous nation live in rural communities, many of which remain offline or still use “torchlight” phones.
Understanding this dilemma, several Agritech startups allow farmers to access their platform with a USSD code that functions on both advanced and “torchlight” phones.
The story was not different for Femi Banjo, chief executive officer of Olafem Farms, who said he used to get ridiculous prices for his farm produce before he found PricePally — an Agritech company that connects farmers with prospective customers through a digital platform.
“I was offered about N6,000 for 10kg of habanero pepper on my farm. I couldn’t believe it, because this is not what happens in the regular market,” he said joyfully. “They only buy based on quantity outside. And when there is plenty of supply, they’ll give you little money.”
Farmers are often poor, and over the years, outdated methods of conducting agribusiness have led to a lack of interest among young people.
The emergence of new entrants like PricePally, Crop2Cash, Soilless Farm Lab, and Winich Farms is changing the lives of Nigerian smallholder farmers, redirecting the narrative of agriculture amongst youths and giving local farmers hope for a prosperous future.
“Young people are not adverse to agriculture. They are adverse to the way it has been portrayed,” Samson Ogbole, team lead of Soilless Farm Lab, told BusinessDay in a telephone interview.
Through his work in Soilless Farm Lab, Farmer Samson, as he is famously called, is growing crops in a 100-acre farm located in Ogun State with hydroponics — a process of growing plants without soil.
Thousands of young people whose interest in agriculture was piqued by seeing it done innovatively by him have graduated from his farm and even gone on to start their own agribusiness ventures.
“It’s not just about technology. It is about efficiency and dignifying agriculture so young people are not discouraged by it,” he noted.
Ogbole explained that the average Nigerian aged 24 to 30 sees agriculture as a thing for old people, because “if you go online and see a picture of a farmer in Africa, you would notice automatically that the farmer you are seeing most times doesn’t look like what you want to look like.”
He says what he and other young people are doing with technology is to create a template that provides dignity in agriculture and fulfilment in being part of a system that drives food sustainability.
For Riches Attai, co-founder of Winich Farms, a raw farm produce supplier across Nigeria, he is using technology to bridge the “monkey dey work, baboon dey chop” operation prominent in middlemen relationships with local farmers.
This comes as several farmers are consistently cheated of their profits by enormous levies imposed on them by middlemen.
With a platform that connects farmers with offtakers, saving them from unnecessary middleman costs and offering real value for their produce, Winich Farms is making farmers rich.
And data showed that the impact is undeniable. A 2023 survey conducted by Winich Farm revealed that a staggering 93 percent of their farmers reported an increase in income by over 50 percent through the platform. This translates to better lives, not just for the farmers themselves, but for their families and communities.
As the World Bank projects that by 2045, Nigeria’s population will grow 45 percent more than its current over 220 million, experts say this raises concern for food security.
They reiterate that the solution lies in how much technology can be adopted into the food value chain.
Although more youths now want to get involved in agriculture with the hopes of using technology, they need investments, Ogbole said. “Yes, there are a lot of young people like myself who are putting in the work; there’s a need for more investment to continue.”
“We cannot expect technology without investment. We cannot expect a different future by doing the same thing,” he added.
